Pray When You're Sick

James 5:14-16 “Is anyone among you sick? Let him call for the elders of the church,and let them pray over him, anointing him with oil in the name of the Lord.15 And the prayer of faith will save the one who is sick, and the Lord will raise him up.And if he has committed sins, he will be forgiven.16 Therefore, confess your sins to one another and pray for one another, that you may be healed.​The prayer of a righteous person has great power as it is working.”

If you’re suffering, you pray. If you you’re sick, call for the elders to pray.

What is sick? Chronic pain, illness, injury, disease – pray. Call for the elders to pray. Go back to Jesus, what happened? Jesus healed people when they came to him and asked him for help. How often do we see in the scripture, Jesus went up to people and said, Are you sick?Let me heal you. That didn’t happen often. People came to Jesus because they knew he had the power. They came to him. The woman who had the constant bleeding just fought through the crowd on her hands and knees to touch the bottom of his garment, and she was healed.

Did Jesus heal all the people? No, he didn’t heal everybody. Listen church, sometimes your healing is going to be temporary, like now. Sometimes the healing you pray for is eternal. You will either be healed here, temporarily – because we’re still going to die. I may get over the cold, or the cancer, or whatever, but at some point I will die, so this healing is temporary.

There’s also a permanent healing. Revelation 21 says there’s no more sickness, crying, fear, all the nasty is gone. We will be healed, completely, totally, permanently. Were some of the illnesses in the Bible a result of sin? Yes, that’s why it says in verse 15 that they will be forgiven. Sin causes sickness sometimes. How do you know? If you are in wide-open unrepentant sin and you follow Christ, you’ve been confronted, you’re not changing, and you’re just not going to change, it could have some physical affects on you. Most of the time the reason we’re sick is not because of our sin. The blind man who came to Jesus, and the disciples asked what kind of sin he or his parents had committed for him to be born blind, Jesus said it’s got nothing to do with sin. It’s just a result of living in a fallen, sinful world.

What happened? When people were sick, they made the call. They called Jesus. The soldier whose son was sick didn’t wait for Jesus to show up, he went. He sent his people to find Jesus and tell him what was going on and ask him to fix it. If you’re sick, call for the elders to pray. Don’t miss this: it is your responsibility to call for the elders to pray over you. That just happened this morning, somebody came up and said they needed us to pray over them. You have to take responsibility to initiate this.

​Nici sent out a text yesterday to the leaders to let them know I was sick. She initiated it. You can’t convince me, after what I saw myself do yesterday morning, you can’t convince me that it wasn’t prayer that allowed me to preach today. That’s prayer. If you have the faith of a mustard seed, you can move mountains. But we don’t believe in prayer! We think it’s just spitting words out into a void, but unless you’re living in unrepentant sin, as soon as you pray, as soon as you seek forgiveness, that channel is wide open. Don’t you dare think that God doesn’t hear the prayer.